the times | Friday August 7 2020 1GM 25
Comment
Selection in state schools needn’t be divisive
Comprehensives arose from the failings of rigid segregation but exciting innovations show how a new path can be forged
Buy prints or signed copies of Times cartoons from our Print Gallery at timescartoons.co.uk or call 020 7711 7826argument was that the data showed
selection was unnecessary and
improvements could be achieved
within the comprehensive system.
This suspicion of selection is
probably born of a deep British
sensitivity about class and losing
identity. Sir Alan Parker — note
the knighthood — explained the
tension well. In an interview in 2003
he said that parents sometimes lost
their children when they succeeded
via education. “I feel that about
mine. I should have been a foreman
in a printing works, and that would
have been all right,” he said. “I
would have stayed working-class
and living where they live. But if
your whole life changes too much,
there’s sometimes an estrangement
because of that. It’s not about not
loving someone, it’s just that you’re
no longer part of their world.”
The beauty of the education
reform process in England,
though, is that it has not mimicked
the harshness of the old, rigid
system with selection at 11. Instead,
it has created scope for widespread
innovation that takes in
academies, free schools, University
Technical Colleges and selective
institutions to catapult the most
academically gifted.
If we want more social mobility,
every city and town across the
left-behind parts of England needs its
own version of Newham Collegiate.government’s Social Mobility
Commission made for troubling
reading. “The better off are nearly
80 per cent more likely to end up in
professional jobs than those from a
working-class background,” it said.
Mobility has flatlined.
It is more complicated than that,
though, and the conventional telling
of this story may be wrong. After
waves of education reform in
England, there are signs of hope for
the future. Under the changes
overseen by Tony Blair and then
Michael Gove, there has been the
introduction of academy schools,
free of local authority control, and all
manner of other innovations. Inner
London moved with reform from
being the worst region in England
for attainment in 2003 to the best by
the middle of the last decade.
This week one of the best new
institutions, established in the East
End of London in 2014, announced
that four of its pupils were heading
to US Ivy League colleges on full
scholarships. Another 37 have
Oxbridge offers. Newham Collegiate
Sixth Form Centre specialises in
science and maths. It stands out from
much of the state system because it
is highly selective.
The education reformers have
tended to be sceptical about
selection, even though Blairites and
Govers usually went to private or
selective schools themselves. Themedia and the civil service,
producing an exciting shift that
looked as though it would create a
permanent realignment of our class
structure, improving access to
opportunity.
It didn’t quite work out that way.
Britain last elected a prime minister
of working-class origins in 1992. The
best-remunerated industries are still
dominated by the privately educated.
Why? In short, from the mid-1960s
the comprehensive school system
was introduced thanks to ideological
educationalists and in response togenuine parental anger about
children and siblings being
segregated in a rigid selective system
that divided pupils into three
different types of school aged 11.
The new comprehensive system
reduced opportunities for the bright
poor, while those affluent enough
bought our children places at the
best schools by purchasing an
expensive house in a good catchment
area or by going private. In the
conventional telling of this story it is
all bound to get irretrievably worse.
Indeed, the State of the Nation report
published last year by the UKSuspicion of selection
is probably born of
sensitivity about class
W
hen Alan Parker set
off in the mid-1950s
for his first day at
grammar school in
Islington, after
passing his 11-plus, neighbours waved
from their windows at the working-
class boy from the corporation flats
on his way up in the world.
From school he had a career in
advertising and became one of
Britain’s finest film directors, making
Bugsy Malone, Midnight Express and
Mississippi Burning. He died last
week, another great figure gone from
that extraordinary postwar cohort of
upwardly mobile, working-class
Britons who revolutionised music,
fashion and film.
I thought about Parker the role
model, proof of the power of
academic selective schooling, on
hearing the news from Scotland of
an educational catastrophe that will
limit the life chances of thousands of
pupils from poorer areas. Faced with
Covid-19, and with exams cancelled,
the SNP’s exams quango conducted
a terrible levelling-down exercise.
Far more marks have been docked
from pupils from schools in deprived
areas, on the basis that their teachers
may have estimated too high.
English examiners have done
something similarly brutal and the
government is braced for protests.
I can imagine the impact, as
someone who attended a Scottish
comprehensive school in the 1980s
with a challenging catchment area
and many pupils suffering
post-industrial poverty. In the
Covid-19 era my good results in
history and English, a passport to
university and a career in the media,
would have been flattened out.
In using such a blunt,
discriminatory instrument, the
authorities have made a grievous
mistake. Considering the
generational damage already done
by Covid-19, in such an unusual year
it would surely have been better to
overlook some grade inflation and in
the process avoid whacking
hundreds of high-potential pupils.
It is is a reminder that Britain’s
continuing problems with social
mobility will be exacerbated by the
coronavirus crisis, which is widening
the attainment gap and will restrict
employment opportunity.
The British used to pride
themselves on closing that gap, and
academic selection was once a key
part of the story. In the 1960s
grammar school pupils flowed into
business, banking, academia, politics,Iain
Martin